I want to go home.

To Pittsburgh, I asked myself as I walked slowly in the cool Southern California Desert morning with the stark San Jacinto Mountains as a backdrop?

No, I thought, not to Pittsburgh, though I miss my old house, my picturesque and historical neighborhood, my friends, the now leafless winter trees, the resuscitated rivers and clear morning air. No, not Pittsburgh.

To my 110 year old house with it’s comfortable, embracing rooms, high ceilings and wood trim that I painted myself, while crying aloud, heard only by the ghosts of former tenants? To the house filled with antiques, mementoes and pictures of nature and of happy times, all taken by him during the four decades we shared together? No, not my house.

To my son’s house then, here in the Desert, where I know every corner of the yard in which I sat last year, at all hours of the day and night, writing in my journal, grieving, meditating, praying and wishing to die? To the yard where, I looked up into the night sky for comfort and talked to the moon that silently shone down on my tear streaked face? No, not my son’s house.

I want to go HOME. Home to the life that I once had that I believed would never end. Home to the familiar warmth of a man who knew my thoughts before I breathed life into them. Home to the joy that was me, to the predictable days and gentle nights of love that lulled me into a false sense of security. “It will always be like this,” I thought. “Of course we are getting older,” I mused, “but we are healthy and we have our love to keep us warm as our bones grow colder and our arteries harden.” It was home until his heart stopped and neither I, nor the paramedics nor all of the medical personnel at the hospital could make it beat again.

I want to go home; but home as I know it is gone forever, and I am left with a life that is unfamiliar, unpredictable and unknown. I realized this morning, in the shadow of the mountains’ morning majesty that home is in my heart. In the heart that loved more than life itself; in the heart that still has the capacity to love and in the heart that gives me the courage to go forward into the unfamiliar, unpredictable and unknown future that is mine.

I am home in me.